The Star-Ledger

Composer conducts a musical journey
Ars Musica Chorale - Saturday at the Guardian Angel Church, Allendale

By Ken Smith
FOR THE STAR-LEDGER

Monday, March 8, 1999 – Perhaps the stars are in musical alignment this month, but for whatever reason, one week after Bloomfield's two-day festival honoring the composer-businessman Charles Ives, audiences in Allendale got to see a modern-day incarnation in composer Stephen Perillo.

Take Ives, replace his teacher Horacio Parker with David Del Tredici, Protestantism with Catholicism, insurance with tourism, and church choir work with commercial sound-tracks and you're well on your way to Perillo (he's the president of his family's high-profile travel agency). The concert works of both composers quote freely from the pop culture of their day.

There, however, the similarities stop. Where Ives embodied rugged American individualism, imploring audiences (in a famous, if dubious, gender reference) to "take their dissonances like a man," Perillo seems all too willing to please.

His Magnificat, which the Ars Musica Chorale premiered last Saturday night at the Guardian Angel Church in Allendale, is a pleasant piece that managers to match the emotive strengths of choral singing with the instrumental possibilities of the orchestra. In the program, Perillo asks what a composer in 1999 can bring to an occasion already marked by the likes of Monteverdi, Vivaldi and Bach. The answer of course, is "himself." Stylistically, the piece is as diverse as Perillo's own musical background.

Each of the text's 12 lines essentially sets a different mood. A conventional bit of choral writing is flavored with one oboe line that seems to have wandered in from a Broadway score. Dynamics are used to great effect, and Perillo also engages in some clever word planting, such as the line "He magnifies me by His power" when the chorus breaks off into a four-part fugue.

But too much of the piece seems content with illuminating the surface, rather than shining a light on the word's rich subtext. Perillo seems immune to the "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" syndrome, where a person who parties like mad the night before can throw himself at the alter with the same conviction the next day. Verdi and Rossini, commercial theater composers of their own day, never quite got the stage makeup wiped off their religious works, yet their places still retain an undeniable dramatic power.

Perillo was much sturdier on secular ground with "Napoli!", a thoroughly charming tone poem for orchestra evocatively spun from Neapolitan-style songs. Early on, the harp and mallet percussion mimicked the sound of a music box; later as the winds began to capture the effect of a carousel slowly whirling out of control, the rest of the orchestra held their horses firmly till the musical ride came to an end.

The instrumentalists fared much less well in Mozart's Requiem in the second half of the evening, where the church's bright acoustics were none too forgiving to the brass. In the chorus, too, the same strengths and weaknesses from the Perillo performances were again on display.

Mozart was a composer for the theater who did manager to clean himself up for church, but in this chorus only the men were ready to join him. Unlike most a vocational vocal groups, the men of Ars Musica were considerably more consistent than the women, with better vocal placement, more accurate entrances and a more precise sense of pitch. Despite the natural advantage higher voices have in being heard, the men were able to dominate the evening.

The solo vocal quartet of soprano Clare Mueller, Mezzo-soprano Daria Dragan, tenor John Bigham and bass Glenn Boothby was mostly well-balanced, through Boothby's part tended to fade in his lower register.